Blue Girl

Seventeen-year-old Imogene jumps at the chance to lose her bad girl reputation when her family moves to a new town. She purposely lays low at Redding High, only making friends with Maxine, a shy, studious girl who is Imogene's opposite in every way. Despite a few run-ins with the ruling football jock and his cheerleader girlfriend, Imogene keeps her temper in check and even lends some of her bravado to Maxine, who begins to come out of her straight-A shell. Things are going well for the new friends--until the day Imogene meets Adrian, the benign ghost of a boy who died in the school's parking lot.

Thoughts

I'm kinda surprised I haven't read any Charles de Lint before, considering how long he's been going in the Urban Fantasy genre (wouldn't be surprised if he invented it, but I have no idea). But on the other hand, that's really the problem: there's so much there, I didn't know where to start. And nobody personally recced anything, so I didn't have any pointers.

So I decided to just start, and The Blue Girl looked as if it wouldn't be too continuity-heavy, so I figured it could be a good place to start.

This is good. Well-written style-wise, with that creepy "things that go bump in the night" atmosphere. I like the heroine, and that's kinda amazing all in itself, because she's one of those "sassy kick-ass" kind of teens that one gets utterly sick of in the SF/F genre nowadays. But I think she works as a character not just because you get inside her head, and thus see that she's not as certain as she seems, but you also get multiple viewpoints of her from other people, and they aren't all Mary-Sue-ing her (which is an easy trap to fall in). I think I also like her because, yes, she "reinvents" herself, but it happens naturally, too.

Plotwise, it isn't obvious what's going to happen, and that's good too.